Queer Theory - Criticism

Criticism

Typically, critics of queer theory are concerned that the approach obscures or glosses altogether the material conditions that underpin discourse. Tim Edwards argues that queer theory extrapolates too broadly from textual analysis in undertaking an examination of the social. Adam Green argues that queer theory ignores the social and institutional conditions within which lesbians and gays live. For example, queer theory dismantles social contingency in some cases (homosexual subject positions) while recuperating social contingency in others (racialized subject positions). Thus, not all queer theoretical work is as faithful to its deconstructionist roots.

Queer theory's commitment to deconstruction makes it nearly impossible to speak of a "lesbian" or "gay" subject, since all social categories are denaturalized and reduced to discourse. Thus, queer theory cannot be a framework for examining selves or subjectivities—including those that accrue by race and class—but rather, must restrict its analytic focus to discourse. Hence, sociology and queer theory are regarded as methodologically and epistemologically incommensurable frameworks by critics such as Adam Isaiah Green. Thus Green writes that Warner, in an introductory section, Michael Warner (1990s) draws out the possibility of queer theory as a kind of critical intervention in social theory (radical deconstructionism); despite this, he weaves back and forth between the reification and deconstruction of sexual identity. Green argues that Warner begins the volume by invoking an ethnic identity politics, solidified around a specific social cleavage and a discussion of the importance of deconstructing notions of lesbian and gay identities; but, despite its radical deconstructionism, it constructs the queer subject or self in largely conventional terms: as lesbian and gay people bound by homophobic institutions and practices. So, one of the leading volumes of queer theory engages the subject via conventional sociological epistemologies that conceive of subject positions constituted through systems of stratification and organized around shared experience and identity. In other way, for Barnard, any consideration of sexuality must include inextricability with racialized subjectivities. Adam Green argues that Barnard implicitly rejects the queer theoretical conceptions of sexuality on the grounds that such work fails to account for particularity of racialized sexualities. He reasons that the failure arises because queer theorists are themselves white, and therefore operate from the particularity of a white racial standpoint. Barnard aspires to recuperate an analysis of race in queer theory, proposing that the deconstructionist epistemology of queer theory can be used to decompose a white queerness (first) in order to recover a racialized queerness (second). Thus, Adam Green argues that Barnard’s attempt to bring social contingency into queer theory violates the core epistemological premise of queer theory; in fact, by proposing that queer theory capture racialized subject positions, Barnard reinstates what it means to be a person of colour. His critique of the white subject position of queer theorists is itself a testimony to the stability of the social order and the power of social categories to mark a particular kind of experience, of subjectivity and, in turn, of queer author. He backs down the road of a decidedly sociological analysis of subject position and the self. Finally, Jagose Green observes that Jagose aims toward an analysis of social cleavages, including those accruing by race and ethnicity. Thus, on the one, Jagose underscores the strong deconstructionist epistemological premise of the term queer and queer theory more generally. Yet, she goes on to analyze identities and sexualities "inflected by heterosexuality, race, gender and ethnicity". Thus Adam Green states that by advocating the incorporation of social contingency in this way, Jagose offers neither the critical edge of queer theory nor the clarity of standpoint theory. However, on the topic of race, Jagose asserted that for a black lesbian, the thing of utmost importance is her lesbianism, rather than her race. Many gays and lesbians of color attacked this approach, accusing it of re-inscribing an essentially white identity into the heart of gay or lesbian identity (Jagose, 1996).

The criticism of queer theory can be divided in three main ideas:

• It has a failing itineration, the "subjectless critique" of queer studies
• The unsustainable analysis of this failing self
• The methodological implication that scholars of sexuality end up reiterating and consolidating social categories

Foucault's account of the modern construction of the homosexual, a starting point for much work in queer theory, is itself challenged by Rictor Norton, using the Molly House as one counter-example of a distinctly homosexual subculture before 1836. He critiques the idea that people distinctly identifying in ways now associated with being gay did not exist before the medical construction of homosexual pathology in his book The Myth of the Modern Homosexual.

Queer theory underestimates the Foucauldian insight that power produces not just constraint, but also, pleasure, according to Barry Adam (2000) and Adam Isaiah Green (2010). Adam suggests that sexual identity categories, such as "gay", can have the effect of expanding the horizon of what is imaginable in a same-sex relationship, including a richer sense of the possibilities of same-sex love and dyadic commitment. And Green argues that queer is itself an identity category that some self-identified "queer theorists" and "queer activists" use to consolidate a subject-position outside of the normalizing regimes of gender and sexuality. These examples call into question the degree to which identity categories need be thought of as negative, in the evaluative sense of that term, as they underscore the self-determining potentials of the care of the self – an idea advanced first by Foucault in Volumes II and III of The History of Sexuality.

The role of queer theory, and specifically its replacement of historical and sociological scholarship on lesbian and gay people's lives with the theorising of lesbian and gay issues, and the displacement of gay and lesbian studies by gender and queer studies, has been criticised by activist and writer Larry Kramer. Kramer reports on a retrograde book by Richard Godbeer, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Miami, called The Overflowing of Friendship. Kramer criticizes Godbeer’s account of 18th century Colonial times. Kramer writes, "Godbeer is hell-bent on convincing us that two men in Colonial America could have exceedingly obsessive and passionate relationships (he called them, variously, 'sentimental,' 'loving,' 'romantic') . . . spend many a night in bed together talking their hearts out, without the issue of sex arising in any way." Kramer does not agree with this theory and believes that the notion the same-sex sexual relationships and experiences existed.

Another criticism is that queer theory, in part because it typically has recourse to a very technical jargon, is written by a narrow elite for that narrow elite. It is therefore class biased and also, in practice, only really known and referenced at universities and colleges (Malinowitz, 1993).

An initial criticism on queer theory is that precisely "queer" does not refer to any specific sexual status or gender object choice. For example Halperin (1995) allows that straight persons may be "queer," which some believe, robs gays and lesbians of the distinctiveness of what causes them to be marginalized. It desexualizes identity, when the issue is precisely about a sexual identity (Jagose, 1996).

Additionally, since queer theory refuses any reference to standard ideas of normality, cannot make crucial distinctions. For example, queer theorists usually argue that one of the advantages of the term "queer" is that it includes transsexuals, sado-masochists, and other marginalized sexualities. How far does this extend? Is transgenerational sex (pedophilia) permissible?

Humanities scholar Camille Paglia -- while not objecting to the study of homosexuality, bisexuality, or other queer subjects per se -- has been harshly critical of queer theory's post-structuralist roots, which she regards as generally unscholarly. She has described prominent queer theorists as "flimflamming freeloaders."